What if there were a way to take the waste heat that spews from car tailpipes or power plant chimneys and turn it into electricity? Matt Scullin thinks there is, and he’s formed a company to turn that idea into a reality.

The key to Scullin’s plans is something called thermoelectrics. “A thermoelectric is a material that turns heat into electricity,” he says.

He says in the longer term, electric cars and those other technologies could mean less demand for oil. Shorter term, the global economy has slowed and that means less thirst for oil right now. At the same time, with fracking the U.S. is now rivaling Saudi Arabia as an oil superpower.

… So he says the Saudis now want cheaper oil, in part to slow down the fracking revolution in the U.S. — and to signal to the developing world: Don’t worry — you don’t need to invest in alternative energy. You can buy cheap oil from us.

“This sale marks a really historic moment in the clean energy future of this country,” said Tommy Beaudreau, director of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, which is part of the Interior Department.

The United States has no offshore wind farms, but some industry experts say the fact that there was competition for these leases shows that despite all the setbacks, the offshore wind industry might soon take off.

“The state [Hawaii] has an initiative to reach 40 percent renewable energy by 2030,” says Nohea Hirahara, an engineer for Hawaiian Electric Company. “I believe that’s the most aggressive of any state. And it’s coming up fast.”

Wind is a particular challenge. It doesn’t blow all the time, so it always needs a backup.
But keeping an oil-fired power plant at the ready is expensive.

Just a few years ago, Georgia Power generated nearly three-fourths of its electricity with coal. Last year, for the first time, natural gas edged out coal, and just this week the company announced plans to close 10 coal-fired power generators within the next few years.

within a few years only a third of the company’s power plants will run on coal.
The company has already built three new natural gas plants. It’s expanding a nuclear plant and going bigger into solar and wind

The dramatic and swift shift away from coal at Georgia Power is part of a nationwide trend: After decades in which coal was king of electricity generation, natural gas is making a bid for the title.

The development already has shrunk the electricity industry’s environmental footprint and reduced prices on wholesale power.

One factor is the expectation that low prices for natural gas will continue because of the shale gas boom across the country.

Another is that new federal rules require coal plants to clean up the mercury and other toxic chemicals in their exhausts.
Installing those pollution controls makes no sense when gas is so cheap.

He says whether the trend continues after 2018 depends on several factors:
– how much the economy and demand for electricity pick up
– whether natural gas prices stay low
– if the federal government comes up with new regulations to limit greenhouse gases and clean up solid wastes from existing power plants

Shea predicts coal will not be the only loser in what he calls electric companies’ “dash to gas.” “We’re not seeing any new coal built,” he says. “But we’re also are not seeing much occurring in the nuclear sphere.
And importantly, the price of gas right now is starting to freeze out the demand for renewables.”

Still, natural gas is cleaner than coal, so the shift from coal already has decreased overall greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation.

But Brune cautions that we can’t rely on natural gas to stabilize the climate and stop the catastrophic effects of global warming that we got a taste of last year. Brune says that means the country has to figure out a way to make the shift to natural gas a temporary one.

Every year, people add 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the air, mostly by burning fossil fuels.
That’s contributing to climate change. A few scientists have been dreaming about ways to pull some of that CO2 out of the air, but face stiff skepticism and major hurdles.

Peter Eisenberger is a distinguished professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University. Earlier in his career, he ran the university’s famed Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and founded Columbia’s Earth Institute.

He started looking for a way to pull carbon dioxide right out of the air. “And it turned out the best device already exists,” he says. “It’s called a monolith. That is the same type of instrument that’s in the catalytic converter in your car. It cleans up your exhaust.”

Eisenberger’s monoliths grab carbon dioxide from the air and release it again when you heat them up.

The company has built two pilot plants at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif.
But of course there are big issues to solve: What do you do with the carbon dioxide once you’ve captured it, and how do you make money?

Growers pipe carbon dioxide into greenhouses.
Oil companies pump it underground to help them squeeze out more oil.
Soda companies use it to put bubbles in their drinks.
These are mostly small-scale applications.

Maybe someday Eisenberger could get paid to clean up the atmosphere by sucking out the CO2 and burying it underground, though there’s no market for that now.

But using carbon dioxide to make fuel could someday be big. So Eisenberger’s first project involves using CO2 to feed algae that churn out biofuel.

“Our first demonstration plant is being erected right now down in Daphne, Alabama, with an algae company called Algae Systems, which sits on Mobile Bay,” Eisenberger says. “They’ll be floating their algae in plastic bags on the top of the water. We’ll be piping in CO2 that we pull out of the air, and the sun will do the rest.”

Of course, this one project will have zero effect on how much carbon dioxide is in the earth’s atmosphere.

Eisenberger says if he can open the door to capturing carbon dioxide from the air — and make the process cheap enough — someday we could actually slow down, or possibly even reverse, the buildup of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Chris Field, director of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology at Stanford University

Terrence Henry, reporter, State Impact Texas

plans on climate change that would include power plants.
Both industry and activists have been expecting decisions that would reduce reliance on coal and boost the use of the natural gas, wind, solar and nuclear energy, all controversial.

any power plant has to have a certain level of emissions, and it wasn’t a very high level of emissions.

the draft standard that the administration presented actually would have even ruled out a number of gas plants. I mean, the standard was so stringent it would’ve actually ruled out a number of gas plants.

for new plants it’s probably safe to say that it’s going to be difficult in the future to build coal plants, at least in an economical fashion in this country.

this is all authority under the Clean Air Act. You know, this is a Bush, you know, 41-era legislation. This is from 1990.
The Clean Air Act gives them authority to regulate these emissions.

Congress took a stab back in 2009, 2010 at climate change legislation, which would have tried to set up a market mechanism. That died. That went nowhere in the Senate. So what had been a threat, EPA action through executive authority, became the default option, and that’s where we are today.

And if, broadly speaking, the coal industry is the loser, who are the winners here?

JOHNSON: Well, obviously natural gas has is a winner, but natural gas has been a winner for the last few years.

So if natural gas is going to be a winner, what about renewable sources – solar, wind – that sort of thing?

JOHNSON: You know, they’ve had a lot of progress in the last couple of years. When President Obama came in, he said he wanted to double the amount of renewable energy in the country, and he’s done that. Again, that was from a relatively small baseline. It’s a relatively small percentage of U.S. power supply. But, yes, there is an awful lot of renewable energy.

These new regulations aren’t going to be the kind of spur, necessarily, for renewable energy, you know, that could jumpstart that sector. There’s other policies you would need in order to make solar a much bigger player in the mix or to make wind energy a much bigger player in the mix.

CONAN: And what about nuclear power?

JOHNSON: Well, nuclear power lately has had the problem – it’s had problems for a number of years, but economics is first and foremost the problem with nuclear power. Cheap gas, you know, may have pushed aside coal. It may have made wind power less competitive, but it really damaged the economic prospects of nuclear power.

And that’s because it costs an awful lot to build a nuclear power plant.
So as gas gets more expensive, nuclear power gets marginally more appealing. But again, these are eight-, 10-year projects in order to make a nuclear power plant. There’s only a couple underway in the U.S.

In 2012, global emissions of carbon dioxide were more than 35 billion tons. They’ve been increasing at a rate of more than two percent a year since the year 2000. And the emissions of electricity are incredibly important. They represent 33 percent of the U.S. emissions. Coal represents 80 percent of those. It’s a big deal not only because it’s a big source of a rapidly growing emissions pool but because they’re real opportunities for the U.S. to exhibit a leadership position on this.

CONAN: The U.S. exhibiting leadership position. At the same time, the U.S. is increasing its exports of coal to places like China, which is building new coal-fired power plants rapidly. Does it make a difference globally whether American coal is burned in Kentucky or whether it’s burned in Shanghai?

U.S. emissions are a significant fraction. If you multiply the fraction of U.S. total emissions by the electricity, by the coal part, over 4 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions are from U.S. coal and the electricity sector. And that’s a meaningful part, and it’s a part that we can have an impact on.